Read it.

If automation-induced unemployment becomes a problem (or if the chattering class can convince voters that it is a problem, which is a different thing entirely), then this is the obvious policy recommendation from those who look first to the government to solve every ill.

Of course, nobody will have the bad grace to mention that constantly increasing the legal ‘minimum wage’ merely encourages increased automation.

My, what a surprise!

Leaked documents show that the California high speed rail is reversing course—quite literally—and changing construction plans on the first 250-mile stretch of track. The new plan will now connect the Central Valley to the Bay Area—not Los Angeles as originally planned.

After all, who would want to go to Los Angeles?

News of the route change comes in the same week consultants projected a $260 million increase in additional costs for the first 22-mile leg of construction—which amounts to a five percent increase in price for a project that has yet to lay a single foot of track.

Your tax dollars at work.

California Assemblyman David Hadley (R-South Bay) told local radio station KFI 640 AM that the new route potentially goes against a provision in the high speed rail legislation that says the train must first connect to Los Angeles. He stated the language was added to ensure Southern Californians didn’t foot the bill for a train that could very well end up becoming a regional transportation project.

Which appears to be exactly what is happening. But when did government employees ever worry about following the law?

The route change is only the latest in a line of broken promises made by the California rail authority. Voters approved the project with a $33 billion price tag—that has since doubled to $68 billion and could go even higher. Construction is already over two years behind schedule and the state has still not disclosed how they plan to raise the $53 billion in additional funds to complete the Los Angeles-to-San Francisco track.

Promises? We don’t need no stinkin’ promises….

The sad part is that the problems with the high speed rail project were entirely predictable.

And predicted. But nobody ever listens when it comes to spending taxpayer money.

Read it.

The U.S. government has yet another intelligence scandal on its hands. It’s an old complaint, one that became common during the Cold War. In short the president and his staff do not agree with intelligence reports relating to ISIL (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant) and have frequently (and quietly) ordered them modified to conform with the more optimistic assessment the president wants. In response dozens of intelligence analysts and managers began complaining more and more, often to the media, that the intel reports the government was passing out were false but no one had the guts or clout to shut down this censorship program.

This sort of thing has long been a problem with intelligence agencies and it became acute during the Cold War. The CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) is responsible (since the late 1940s) for collecting, analyzing and reporting intel any problems with accuracy. The accuracy of this work is a matter of life and death because these reports, passed on to the Department of Defense and Congress are used as the basis for making all sorts of decisions. Keeping all this intel honest is a primary mission of the CIA. But the CIA track record is not all that great. There have been other problems as well, like the increasing likelihood of being found out.

Read it.

President Obama’s Department of Education has been waging a seven-year war against for-profit colleges. So it’s a lesson in the self-interested ways of the modern regulatory state to see a veteran of that war now seeking to profit from education.

…

The University of Phoenix was once educating close to half a million students but last month reported an enrollment below 180,000. And with Apollo recently trading below book value, it might be a real bargain—especially for an investor betting that the next Administration might go easier on for-profit colleges. Now comes news that Apollo will be sold to several private equity firms. And coincidence of all coincidences, after the sale closes the company will be run by a former top official in the Obama education department, the same outfit that led the attack on Apollo.

Gee, funny how that works.

To summarize, an Obama pal is the day-to-day boss of a department that succeeds in destroying 90% of the value of a politically targeted company. Then he leaves government, buys the company at a fire-sale price and announces that the problems that attracted so much negative government attention are ending—just in time for a new Administration that might not hate for-profit education as much as this one. Government mediation sure can be a lucrative business model.

Read it.

The 1998 Travel and Transportation Reform Act, which mandated the use of travel cards, ironically intended to simplify government employees’ purchases. But since each government agency manages its own employees’ cards, there is no uniform oversight of misuses. Over the years, whistleblowers shed light on the corruption of the travel card, agency by agency.

The most recent culprit is the Pentagon. From July 2013 to June 2014, Pentagon employees spent nearly $ 1 million at casinos using their travel cards. Also, employees spent more than $96,000 at “adult entertainment establishments.” Out of the 4,000 individual transactions, only 41 received punishment and a “letter of reprimand.”

Read it.

The elites know what they want: a trackable record of every transaction that happens on planet Earth. Those who stand in the way or object are just facilitating “bad guys.” Some evidence this week from Harvard University, where Peter Sands, president emeritus of Harvard, has issued a new paper on the topic of “Making it Harder for the Bad Guys: The Case for Eliminating High Denomination Notes.”

Who cares? It’s all just paper, and equally worthless, no matter what number is on the face. It’s only worth something because some government stands behind it with a gun — and even that doesn’t always work, as Zimbabwe and half a dozen South American kleptocracies have found out.

Read it.

Yesterday a judge sided with the FBI, ordering Apple to not exactly create a back door to bypass its encryption, but pretty damn close. The judge has ordered Apple to assist the FBI by making it possible to bypass or deactivate the auto-erase function that deletes the contents of the phone after too many failed password attempts; to allow the FBI to electronically submit passcodes rather than manually; and to eliminate any delays in the system between password attempts. The demands are clearly designed so that the FBI would be able to try to brute force the password by attempting every possible number combination. (You can read the full order and some technical analysis at Techdirt here).

…

What Cook doesn’t say but should be extremely obvious is that even if Apple creates only one of these devices for the government, the feds will most certainly try to backwards-engineer the tool to figure out how to replicate it. We have seen every single surveillance authorization given to the federal government abused and expanded to snoop on citizens for inappropriate reasons and without due process. There’s no reason to believe the same thing won’t happen here and that the justification for breaking encryption won’t be defined downward from “terrorist who killed 14 people” to “suspected drug dealer” or what the FBI defines as a domestic “extremist.”

If history tells us anything, it is that, when it comes to the ‘slippery slope’ argument, every government employee comes dipped in butter and ready to roll.

The Devil roams about the world like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. Resist him, steadfast in the faith.

Read it.

Then there is the model that Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, have pursued — with astonishing success. For them, politics is the family business. There is no distinction between business careers and political careers. Holding and serving in public office provides a platform from which they can monetize experience, connections and prominence. And then they use the wealth gained through, say, speaking engagements and media tours, to lay the groundwork for the next campaign. Electoral office, business, wealth, and public service, all meld together seamlessly.

We got your 1%, right here.

Read it.

Wherever you stand on the subject of global warming, pay close attention to one under-reported aspect of the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference or Paris Agreement. I am referring to the Green Climate Fund (GCF), which is a financial mechanism intended “to assist developing countries in adaptation and mitigation practices to counter climate change.” According to the current estimates, developed countries will be obliged to contribute up to $450 billion a year by 2020 to the GCF, which will then “redistribute” the money to developing countries allegedly suffering from the effects of global warming.

Lo and behold, Zimbabwe’s government-run daily “newspaper” The Herald repored that “Southern Africa is already counting the costs of climate change-linked catastrophes… In Zimbabwe, which has seen a succession of droughts since 2012, a fifth of the population is facing hunger… feeding them will cost $1.5 billion or 11 percent of… the Gross Domestic Product.”

No doubt Robert Mugabe, the 91-year-old dictator who has ruled Zimbabwe since 1980, is salivating at the prospect of some global warming cash. Beginning in 2000, Mugabe started to expropriate privately-held agricultural land. The result of what what is euphemistically called “land reform,” was a monumental fall in productivity and the second highest bout of hyperinflation in recorded history.

Read it.

The University of Missouri’s face of campus fascism, communications professor Melissa Click, has been furiously back peddling and apologizing for assaulting a student and calling for “muscle” to physically remove a student journalist from a public space. This campaign to save her job might have worked, had not new police body cam footage shown her in a separate incident screaming at a police officer to “get your f—— hand off me!”

She reminds me of that American chick who got run over by an Israeli bulldozer while training ‘Palestinian’ kids to hate America. (I can never remember her name.)

Read it.

The government has made one last attempt to screw over a victim of an IRS bank account seizure. The screwing began in December of 2014, when the IRS — despite stating it would not perform forfeitures if there was no clear evidence of wrongdoing — lifted $107,000 from convenience store owner Lyndon McLellan. This was yet another one of the IRS’s “structuring” cases, predicated solely on the fact that multiple deposits under $10,000 were made. ($10,000 triggers automatic reporting to the federal government.)

After the IRS announced it would not be pursuing questionable structuring seizures — thanks mainly to several rounds of negative press — it still continued to pursue McLellan’s case, despite IRS Commissioner John Koskinen telling a Congressional subcommittee that this was exactly the sort of case the IRS would no longer be pursuing.

Read it.

Two Escondido, California, high school students—ages 16 and 18—could see their whole lives derailed because they committed the crime of keeping fishing supplies in cars they parked on school property.

The elder teen, Brandon Cappelletti, had three knives in his car: the remnants of a family fishing trip. The knives were used to cut lines and filet fish. The younger teen, Sam Serrato, had a pocketknife in his glove compartment. His father had left it there.

Both teens are facing expulsion. Cappelletti, a legal adult, could serve jail time if convicted of weapons charges, according to The San Diego Union-Tribune.

Who doubts that, if they had been black, they would be free and facing no punishment?

Steve Sailer understands the dialectic.

One of the weirder contradictions of contemporary dogma is the belief that race does not exist combined with the government’s obsession with counting everybody by self-identified race. If race doesn’t exist, you’d think that, say, the Obama Administration would be under a lot of pressure from its supporters to dump the racial/ethnic classification system. Strangely enough, it never seems to occur to all the True Believers to ask their friends running the federal government to change the system.

Read it.

As the Antiplanner noted last week, Los Angeles is not the only region experiencing declining transit ridership. Another is Washington, DC, where a recent report from the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA aka Metro) revealed that ridership has fallen to the lowest level since 2004. The agency’s financial situation is so bad that WMATA’s number-two executive has resigned and, ominously, the agency has hired a bankruptcy attorney to help it deal with its problems.

Once again, politicians’ fondness for trains over automobiles will cost the taxpayers millions.

Read it.

If you look closely at the numbers in the Obama budget proposal, you find that Treasury economists figure that U.S. multinational companies with profits overseas are exploiting the tax code even more than previously estimated–which means even more money would be raised by changing the way U.S. companies’ international profits are taxed.

Oh, so is Obama suggesting that we bring our corporate tax rates in line with other developed nations and encourage American companies to bring that money back home rather than scrambling around for tax shelters overseas? No, of course not.

The Obama plan would require companies to pay that 19% minimum rate to all governments combined, not just the U.S. The taxes that U.S.-based firms pay to foreign governments would count toward the minimum. The less they pay in taxes abroad, they more they’d have to pay to the U.S.

Rather than addressing the basic problem, the administration is trying to nail the doors shut so the livestock can be more easily slaughtered.

It’s hard to say definitively what’s behind this.

No, it’s not. The U.S. government is determined to bleed its businesses as thoroughly as it can, and this is the only area in which appealing to how foreign nations do things doesn’t seem to carry any weight.

It looks like U.S. companies are increasingly skillful at finding low-tax countries in which to book their profits while, for their part, foreign governments are reducing the rates at which they tax business.

And the administration’s actions merely increase the incentives to be even more clever in finding loopholes. The more cornered a victim feels, the more desperate the attempts to escape. And I suspect that companies like Apple can afford better attorneys and accountants than the IRS can.

Read it.

As the Super Bowl weekend excitement fades and the Panthers have left California with a loss, at least one player takes a second hit. Since out-of-state athletes are levied with the ‘Jock Tax’, Cam Newton will pay $101,360 on his bonus of $51,000- effectively making his loss one championship ring and roughly $50,000. That’s a bad day.

Read it.

It seems like so long ago, but really isn’t. In 2013, President Barack Obama acknowledged that the IRS had in fact been directing extra scrutiny to broadly defined right-wing “Tea Party” groups as they applied for various forms of tax-code recognition. In fact, Obama forced out the acting commissioner of the agency and pledged publicly, “I will not tolerate this kind of behavior in any agency, but particularly the IRS given the power that it has and the reach that it has in all of our lives.”

Paul Caron, a Pepperdine University academic who runs the always interesting TaxProf blog, recently celebrated the 1000th day of the scandal, which he argues (convincingly) has never really been covered or investigated fully. After Obama’s first big statements, interest drifted away for the most part and even the president’s bald acknowledgements that something was rotten at the IRS started to be walked back.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

In a new USA Today column, Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit, who’s been linking to TaxProf for the past 1,000-plus days, sums up the social implications of the IRS scandal:

It’s not just that evidence overwhelmingly points to the IRS having been weaponized in an effort to neutralize Obama’s Tea Party opposition. It’s that ordinary Americans can look at this and conclude that there’s no reason to follow the law if they can get away with breaking it since the people in charge of enforcing the law clearly regard it with contempt.

Read it.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Obamacare: The gift that keeps on shivving.

Read it.

Somehow, when the Founders were setting up the country, I suspect that having the Federal government dictate to a local city how much they pay their police was not the sort of role they had in mind.

Read it.

And here I thought he was the President of the United States. Good to know for whom he’s actually working.

Read it.

Oklahoma faces a $900 million overspending problem, and that number could reach as high as $1 billion with falling gas prices and lower tax collections in December. Gov. Mary Fallin’s solution is $910 million in “recurring revenue,” an evasive term for tax hikes.

Pledge, schmedge — when money runs short, a politician will always pick raising taxes over cutting spending.

Read it.

President Obama has unveiled his last budget proposal, which calls for $4.1 trillion in spending for FY 2017. In the final year of his presidency Obama is by definition a lame duck. With Republicans in control of Congress–even though it doesn’t always seem like it–he is the lamest possible duck. As always, Obama’s final budget purports to cover the next ten years. But since Obama will be gone in a mere eleven months, why should anyone care what he wants ten years from now?

Investor’s Business Daily points out that 70% of Obama’s budget consists of writing checks to individuals. It’s a sign of the times: the principal purpose of the federal government is one not found in the Constitution, redistributing wealth, most often from the young and middle-aged to the elderly.

Obama’s budget is a fantasy in several respects. It calls for programs that have no chance of being enacted. It relies on economic growth projections that will not be realized. It proclaims goals–stop the Earth’s climate from changing, as it has been doing for millions of years!–that cannot be achieved by any federal action. In one respect, however, it is not a fantasy: it would transfer trillions of dollars from those who earned the money to Democratic Party constituencies, like “green” energy scammers. At bottom, Democratic Party policies are motivated by a cold, hard realism.

And the chattering classes wonder why people are voting for Trump.

Read it.

The taxpayers of Barre Town, Vermont, just spent $83,750 settling a lawsuit that should never have happened. The money is going to one mother who was banned from her child’s school last year. Her offense? An off-handed comment she made about a 2006 school shooting.

Katie Sherman had been fighting with the school district already, asking them to give her special-needs son the accommodations his Individualized Education Plan (IEP) requires. According to The Barre Montpeliar Times Argus, the dispute goes back to November 2014, when the school first issued the IEP. Sherman expressed concerns and then filed an official complaint in January 2015.

She enlisted the help of advocacy group Vermont Family Network (VFN) and later commented to VFN’s Martha Frank that she could understand how Christopher Williams, an Essex, Vermont, man convicted of killing two elementary school teachers, had been “pushed to the edge.”

Little did Sherman know the Supervisory Union would use that comment as justification to issue a no-trespass order, which kept her from going to meetings to complain about the IEP problem. The order also prevented her from voting in elections, since her son’s school is also her polling place. In July, Sherman sued, claiming the order violated her constitutional right to vote as well as her right to participate in public meetings.

There must be a special stupidity test that prospective government employees, especially school administrators, have to fail before they’re hired on.

Read it.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has proposed a regulation to prohibit conversion of vehicles originally designed for on-road use into racecars. The regulation would also make the sale of certain products for use on such vehicles illegal. The proposed regulation was contained within a non-related proposed regulation entitled “Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Fuel Efficiency Standards for Medium- and Heavy-Duty Engines and Vehicles—Phase 2.”

The regulation would impact all vehicle types, including the sports cars, sedans and hatch-backs commonly converted strictly for use at the track. While the Clean Air Act prohibits certain modifications to motor vehicles, it is clear that vehicles built or modified for racing, and not used on the streets, are not the “motor vehicles” that Congress intended to regulate.

Read it.

Of course. We can’t have all those businesses growing and creating value; why, they might even create jobs, and where would Democrats be without their dependent underclass?

Read it.

One of the biggest victories of the copyright maximalists was the successful adoption of the 1996 WIPO Copyright Treaty, implemented by the DMCA in the US, and the Copyright Directive in the EU. Its key innovation was to criminalize the circumvention of copyright protection mechanisms. That strengthens copyright enormously by introducing yet another level of legal lockdown, and thus yet another powerful weapon for copyright holders to wield against their customers. But as Techdirt has reported, the anti-circumvention laws are now being used to prevent people from exploring or modifying physical objects that they own.

The DMCA’s anti-circumvention rules not only strengthen an old monopoly — copyright — they create a new one. Because it is forbidden to circumvent protection measures, only the original manufacturer or approved agents can legally repair a device that employs such technologies. Motherboard has an interesting profile of efforts by the wider repair industry to dismantle that new monopoly before it spreads further and becomes accepted as the norm.

This may seem obscure but it’s not — these sorts of monopolies are how governments stifle individual freedom, not to mention technical innovation and economic progress. For an example, read Before I Can Fix This Tractor, We Have to Fix Copyright Law.

Read it.

Obamacare: The gift that keeps on shivving.

Read it.

The University of California (UC) announced Thursday in a press release that it has officially allotted the first $5 million in loans for distribution to illegal immigrant students through the California DREAM Act.

Approximately 3,500 illegal students in the UC system will be granted financial aid this year though the 2014 bill, which will serve students at all nine UC campuses.

My, how special.

UC president Janet Napolitano called the DREAM program an investment for the students, the state, and nation as a whole. Students residing in the U.S. illegally in California are eligible for state and UC aid, but not federal aid.

A name famed in song and story.

Alexis Moran, a third-year Hispanic student at UCLA, told Campus Reformthat by being exclusively available to illegal immigrants, these resources would not only hurt “law abiding citizens who are of all ethnicities including Hispanic, but they are also promoting and sponsoring people who are breaking the laws of our state and country.”

As if the Crust gave a shit about law abiding citizens.

Read it.

Imagine you run a barbershop and you learn that someone is planning to open a rival business down the street. What do you do?

One option, of course, would be to compete the old-fashioned way by offering lower prices or better service. But the old-fashioned way is hard! Wouldn’t it be nice if you could keep your competitor from setting up shop in the first place? There’s evidence that a growing number of businesses in the U.S. are trying to do exactly that. And while that may be good for them, it’s bad for entrepreneurs, workers and the economy as a whole.

On Tuesday, a Senate subcommittee held a hearing on “occupational licensing” laws, which require government-issued licenses to perform certain types of work. Such laws have long existed for doctors, lawyers and others in highly skilled professions, but they are increasingly spreading to low- and mid-skill jobs as well. A White House report last summer found that occupational licensing requirements have increased fivefold since the 1950s, covering more than a quarter of all workers in 2008. Cosmetologists, tree trimmers and even interior designers need licenses in some states.

The only way to prevent competition is via government action, and that is the major source of (a) special interest legislation and (b) corruption in government, not just in America but around the world.

Read it.

My question is, what business is it of a professor what terms students use, so long as they accurately express the meaning the students intend?

In the syllabus for her “Creativity In Context” class — a required course for any student pursuing a minor in Innovation — UF professor Jennifer Lee informs students of her four paragraph long classroom “communications policy” that she says will enforce “ethical conduct” in the classroom.

There appears to be something in the bottled water supplied to Florida colleges these days.

Mark Steyn scratches his head.

Aside from the Marco Rubot malfunction, the most dismal aspect of Saturday’s Republican debate was the sight of supposed conservatives competing in their enthusiasm for making women sign up for “selective service”. For non-Americans, I should explain that registering for “selective service” – as in military service – is something all young men have to do upon turning 18, so, in the event that the draft is ever reinstated, they’ll have everybody’s name in the big database. As with many aspects of the vast bloated federal bureaucracy, it seems a largely redundant exercise: I mean, between Social Security numbers, the IRS and the US Census, don’t they have every 18-year-old male in the database already?

Oh, Mark, Mark, Mark. When will you ever learn? The purpose of government isn’t to provide a service efficiently; it’s to hire and pay government workers. And if that means paying more than once for the same thing, they’re okay with that.

Be that as it may, there’s now a proposal to make the young ladies register for selective service, too. And naturally the Republican candidates were falling all over each other to say how hot they were for the idea. For my own part, I’d like to go back to the days – barely within living memory now – when America won wars, rather than figure out ways to lose them more diversely. But, as usual with Republican pandering, it seemed to me a bit behind the curve.

Indeed. Time to Get With The Program.

Read it.

Jackson, Mississippi, City Council member Kenneth Stokes is calling for an investigation of a local gun dealer who posted a sign saying that people who vote for Stokes or President Barack Obama are too stupid to own a gun. “If this gun dealer feels that it’s legal for him to display negative images of the president of the United States, keep in mind that he must have some kind of license,” Stokes said. “We’re asking the attorney general of the United States to do an investigation and let’s see whether the rules and regulations have been violated.”

Note that he wasn’t interested in violations of the Constitution. ‘Free speech? We don’t need no stinkin’ free speech!’

Never was a sign so thoroughly validated.

Read it.

St. Louis residents no longer have a football team, but that doesn’t mean they will get to stop paying for one. While the Rams won a vote in mid-January to relocate to Los Angeles, St. Louis taxpayers will still be responsible for making $144 million in debt and maintenance payments for the Edward Jones Dome.

Lewis Reed, the St. Louis Board of Alderman president, has asked the NFL for money to help pay off the debt, but he seems unaware of how the multi-billion dollar league operates.

As Reason has reported in the past, stadium financing is one way the NFL holds cities hostage—either pay for a state-of-the-art facility or lose the prestige of having a professional football team. This has resulted in often lopsided stadium deals that leave cities (and their taxpayers) burdened with much of the debt.

Not that taxpayers got all that much to say about it; politicians just LOVE major league teams.

Read it.

Much like the Mafia, the government is always on the lookout for new ways to steal money.

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Hint: When you raise the price of something, people buy less of it.

Hiring at restaurants, hotels and other leisure and hospitality sector venues slowed markedly last year in metro areas that saw big minimum-wage hikes, new Labor Department data show.

Wherever cities implemented big minimum-wage hikes to $10 an hour or more last year, the latest data through December show that job creation downshifted to the slowest pace in at least five years.

Liberals fighting for a dramatic increase in the minimum wage have insisted that there would be a negligible impact on job creation. Though the data are preliminary and overly broad, Washington D.C., Oakland, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle and Chicago seem to be finding out that the reality isn’t so benign.

Demonstrating once again that the ‘reality-based community’ isn’t.

Read it.

The ‘progressive’ campaign to cancel anything after 1900 proceeds at taxpayer expense.

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The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program, the most expensive military program in the world, is even more broken than previously thought. The jet can’t tell old parts from new ones, randomly prevents user logins into the logistics information system, and trying to eject out of it will likely result in serious neck injury and maybe death. A Pentagon office is warning that the plane is being rushed into service.

In short, it’s a piece of crap, as I have been saying all along.

Read it.

At a Congressional hearing on the Flint water crisis, Republican Rep, Jason Chaffetz vowed to “hunt down” emergency manager Darnell Earley and drag him to Washington, D.C. to explain why he did nothing while citizens drank poisoned water for months.

“We’re calling on the U.S. Marshals to hunt him down and give him that subpoena,” said Chaffetz.

Darnell Earley is, as you might suspect, a black Democrat ‘public administrator’.

Mark Steyn is brutally blunt.

During the Cold War, the Soviet Union funded “peace movements” throughout the west – because for the Soviets “peace” meant “the absence of opposition”.

In our time the new peace movement is Islam. And so we are told today, from the podium of a mosque with “extremist” “links”, that the very word Islam means “peace”. Actually, it means “submission” – ie, the absence of opposition.

The only difference between then and now is that instead of being chanted by scrofulous hippies protesting outside a Nato air base the old line’s being peddled to us by the President of the United States. Odd.

Concise and to the point.

Just to reiterate a point I’ve made before: Two decades ago I met many refugees from Yugoslavia’s descent into civil war – for example, a family from Mostar in Herzegovina. They’d spent months living in the roofless remains of a bombed house eating rats and whatever else they could find. And it showed. They were youngish people but they war-ravaged: sunked-cheeked, slack-skinned, with rotting teeth and clothes that hung off their emaciated bodies. You didn’t need to be told they were refugees from a civil war: They might as well have had a neon sign on their heads. Oh, and they were Muslim, too.

Oddly enough, their co-religionist “refugees” don’t look like that at all. The ones I saw in Denmark and Sweden were well-fed, well-dressed – and fit and muscular, as German women discovered at New Year.

Read it.

San Diego’s overabundance of water during one of California’s worst droughts has reached a new, absurd level. The San Diego County Water Authority has dumped a half billion gallons of costly drinking water into a lake near Chula Vista.

Now that drinking water has been poured into a lake, the water must be treated a second time before humans can consume it. And here’s another kick in the gut. The drinking water that’s now been dumped into the lake includes desalinated water, some of the most expensive treated water in the world. Water officials will now have to spend even more money to make the once-drinkable desalinated water drinkable once again.

Sounds like a government to me.

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In the past several years politicians have lined up to condemn an epidemic of sexual assault on college campuses. But there is a genuine question of whether the Education Department has exceeded its legal authority in the way it has used Title IX to dictate colleges’ response to the serious problem of sexual assault.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Read it.

This push for social justice requirements is getting a little ridiculous, isn’t it?

More GoodThink from the Ministry of Truth.

Read it.

Revital Zilonka, an education instructor at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro, requires all students in her “Institution of Education” class to state their personal and professional commitment to social justice in an eight-page essay. Her class syllabus also provides a list of feminist and LGBTQ organizations to “like” on Facebook. The class is required to receive a k-12 teaching license in the state.

Rarely does the Marxist indoctrination machine come out of the closet this far.

Read it.

The State Department is lying when it says it didn’t know until it was too late that Hillary Clinton was improperly using personal e-mails and a private server to conduct official business — because it never set up an agency e-mail address for her in the first place, the department’s former top watchdog says.

“This was all planned in advance” to skirt rules governing federal records management, said Howard J. Krongard, who served as the agency’s inspector general from 2005 to 2008.

The Harvard-educated lawyer points out that, from Day One, Clinton was never assigned and never used a state.gov e-mail address like previous secretaries.

Boy, that sure sounds suspicious, doesn’t it?

He also points to the unusual absence of a permanent inspector general during Clinton’s entire 2009-2013 term at the department. He said the 5¹/?-year vacancy was unprecedented.

But very convenient. Hmmm….

Added Krongard: “She’s trying to distance herself from the conversion from SIPRNet to [the nonsecure] NIPRNet and to her server, but she’s throwing her staffers under the bus.”

Hey, that sounds just like a … a Clinton.

Still, “It will never get to an indictment,” Krongard said.

For one, he says, any criminal referral to the Justice Department from the FBI “will have to go through four loyal Democrat women” — Assistant Attorney General Leslie Caldwell, who heads the department’s criminal division; Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates; Attorney General Loretta Lynch; and top White House adviser Valerie Jarrett.

Even if they accept the referral, he says, the case quickly and quietly will be plea-bargained down to misdemeanors punishable by fines in a deal similar to the one Clinton’s lawyer, David Kendall, secured for Gen. David Petraeus. In other words, a big slap on the wrist.

“He knows the drill,” Krongard said of Kendall.

Democrats investigating Democrats: Nobody gets fired, nobody goes to jail.

Read it.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

In Washington, D.C., Lois Lerner, head of the tax-exempt organizations division of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), allegedly slowed or killed the nonprofit applications of conservative and libertarian organizations. In Wisconsin, Kevin Kennedy, director of his state’s political ethics organization and Lerner’s longtime “professional friend,” worked with a rogue Milwaukee district attorney to spy on, and seize the personal papers and equipment of, supporters of Gov. Scott Walker, a Republican. In Texas, the benign-sounding Texas Ethics Commission convened to determine whether a conservative nonprofit journalist is really a journalist and therefore deserving of First Amendment protections—or is an activist who does not.

In each case, the officials leading the charge are Democrats. And in each case, they invoke the language of campaign-finance reform and the specter of so-called “dark money”—donations to nonprofit organizations that Democrats allege have tipped the electoral scales rightward.

Campaign finance regulations are designed to make it as difficult as possible to get people elected who don’t already have the newspapers and TV on their side (i.e. Democrats). This is just more blatant than usual.

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My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Read it.

Another whistleblower is facing charges brought by this administration — one that has prosecuted more whistleblowers than all other administrations combined. Thomas Tamm, a DOJ lawyer during the Bush era, exposed the NSA’s super-secret domestic surveillance program, whose authorization ran directly from the Attorney General to the Chief Judge of the FISA Court.

I guess when Obama said he would run the most transparent Administration in history, he was referring to letting his inner fascist shine through.

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But throughout the 2000s, the Pentagon spent $51.2 billion on 15 major programmes “without any fielded systems to show for it,” according to a new Center for Strategic and International Studies report.

The abandoned projects are largely due to a lack of funding attributed to the Budget Control Act and sequestration.

Hey, got to pay for all that welfare somehow.

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In the same week a federal jury convicted a Chicago transportation official of taking bribes from a leading manufacturer of red-light cameras, council members in another prominent American city are raising questions about the equipment’s effectiveness in improving traffic safety.

Several city council members in Tampa said this week they felt duped by promises of that red-light cameras would reduce traffic crashes. That’s not happening. Instead, crashes at 23 intersections where cameras are installed in the city have increased between 40 and 51 percent, two separate analyses found.

“We were told this would help and stop crashes and it’s not,” Tampa councilwoman Yvonne Yolie Capin tells WTSP-TV. “I look at these numbers and I don’t see the value to our tax dollars.”

Her comments came following a contentious meeting about the red-light cameras. Last month, a study compiled by the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles showed crashes increased 14.6 percent at intersections after cameras were installed.